Product Manager’s Greetings 2018-H1

We are acquiring new customers steadily and putting also lots of resources on the development of the Silverbucket software. We are developing the tool for our customers and in the future our aim is to also be open about the roadmap and its initial schedule. As everyone knows, predicting the future is not easy. Our priority lies always within customer needs, which may cause a delay in the initial roadmap schedules. Therefore, please keep in mind that the given schedules are estimates. Even though we present our plans here, they might change quickly. For us, it is important to get feedback from our customers to make the right decisions regarding development ideas and succeed in prioritisation.

What new features to expect during Silverbucket’s first half-year in 2018? The big development themes are skill management, different work load types (“soft” and “hard”) and some finishing touches of the new UI. In addition, we are developing our own processes continuously and one visible process change will be a more frequent Silverbucket update cycle (appr. once a month).

Skill management

Currently it is possible to add skills and skill categories in Silverbucket. You add skills to people by “tagging”, and with the data you can search people by different skills. You can also give skills for roles in projects.

We have collected a lot of customer feedback and ideas how to develop further the skill management in Silverbucket. The recognized themes have been: marking the skill levels, making the management easier with heavy skill structures, suggestion of the most suitable person based on his/her skills in a project, and a wider skill categorization hierarchy.

These features are in the planning phase and will go to execution most likely during 2018-Q1.

”Soft” and ”hard” resource allocations

The current resource planning method is so called “hard” allocation management. If the user can make resource planning, are the allocation changes automatically accepted and the resource planner assumes that the allocation load will be executed.

In addition to this ”hard” allocation mode, we have recognized a rising need for “soft” allocation management (aka resourcing requests). We are planning a feature where a user can choose an allocation type when making a new allocation. This feature could be utilized with certain users or user groups where their requests would be directed to their superior. The superior will either accept or deny the requests.

These features will go to execution most likely during 2018-Q2.

Finishing the UI renewal

During 2017 we executed a wide user interface renewal. In the beginning of 2018 most of our customers are using the new UI and we are targeting to eliminate the old UI during 2018-H1 meaning that we will end also the maintenance regarding the old version.

The big UI change didn’t come alone, we have received some feedback and taken actions to absorb it. The most critical changes we have already brought to the newest version, such as optimizations of the main views so that it is easier to view more data as default. We continue among this optimization work.

In addition, we are planning to execute “Classic” views to certain pages which will retell some parts of the old version. The Classic views will be executed with the components of the new UI. Accordingly, in the future users can choose which view mode they want to use.

These are the first main topics for the beginning of 2018. We are open for your ideas and feedback so if you think there is some feature missing which would make your resourcing job easier, let us know!